I rush out of my library, resolutely intending to tell something to my wife in the next room. When I get there, my intention is gone. I go back to the library, and find the memory of what I wanted to say, undulating lightly in the air. Augustine wanted to penetrate memory by searching through the dusty files of his mind, but that’s the wrong, or at least a very limited approach. Memories are not “in there,” tucked away in... Read more
Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1914 (1983/2003) is an enormously rewarding book. A few highlights. In his introduction, Kern carefully examines how technological and cultural developments interacted during his time period. He eschews “technological determinism in cultural history” in favor of a nuanced spectrum of interactions. At times, technical developments directly affected culture: “James Joyce was fascinated by the cinema, and in Ulysses he attempted to recreate in words the montage techniques used by early film makers.”... Read more
Adam describes how modern efforts at time-control have undermined time-control: “For clock time to exist and thus to be measurable and controllable there has to be duration, an interval between two points in time. Without duration there is no before and after, no cause and effect, no stretch of time to be measured.” With the development of transportation and communication technologies, intervals have been reduced to the vanishing point: (more…) Read more
Virilio notes that (in Adam’s summary) “through the ages, the wealth and power associated with ownership of land was equally tied to the capacity to traverse it and to the speed at which this could be achieved.” A lord of vast holdings without horses to defend its distant borders won’t be lord for long. Even in societies where wealth is “space” (ie, land) based, it is necessarily also based in mastery of time. Read more
Paul Virilio observes that time “compression” (a Marxist term, referring to speeding-up of economic and other social processes) has unintended and counter-intentional consequences. Adam summarizes: “while cars, planes and trains had become progressively aster, the time spent in transit had not been compressed at an equal rate. Standstill and traffic jams, snails’ pace and stop-go progression are key features of today’s traffic around urban centres. Endless queues in crowded lobbies are a mark of travel by plane [especially in the... Read more
Barbara Adam ( Time ) remarks, “In medieval Europe the Church as God’s representative on earth was the keeper and guardian of time. Not even the sovereign had jurisdiction over it. The sovereign had the monopoly over weights and measures; the churches were in charge of time in all its forms, but most especially calendar time.” A key shift in the collapse of the medieval system was the shift from church-ruled time to market-ruled time. Modern forms of time control... Read more
We can’t not talk about Jesus. He is the Word, the Living Word behind, in with and under, all our words. Whatever we try to articulate, and do articulate, with truth, is about the One in whom all things hold together. Whenever we speak falsely, we are speaking against the Word. We cannot not talk about Jesus. Read more
On the Psalms, Calvin wrote: “although David speak of himself in this Psalme: yit he speaketh not as a common person, but as one that beareth the person of Christ, bicause he was the universall pattern of the whole Churche: and the same is a thing worth the marking, too the intent eche of us may frame himselfe too susteine like lotte. For like as it behoved the thing too bee substauncially fulfilled in Christ, which was begun in David:... Read more
Samuel Mather wrote that “types relate not only to the Person of Christ; but to his Benefits, and to all Gospel Truths and Mysteries, even to all New Testament Dispensations.” To speak of “types of Christ” is thus not merely to speak of types fulfilled in Jesus, but types that “shadowed forth Christ and all the good that comes by him.” There is some continuity here with the Augustinian Totus Christus as a principle of interpretation, but what striking is... Read more
William Perkins on the one sense of Scripture, referring specifically to Galatians 4: “There is but one full and intire sense of every place of scripture, and that is also the literal sense . . . . To make many senses of scripture is to overturn all sense, and to make nothing certen.” Perkins, however, goes on to say that typology is located within this single, literal sense: “It may be said, that the historie of Abrahams familie here propounded,... Read more
Leithart
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